one detail in steven universe i think is super interesting is how characters hardly ever say 'i love you' or even that they're queer, they show it.
it's never explicitly stated that steven and connie are in love or dating, or that stevonnie is nonbinary, we can tell because of how close the two of them always are and from stevonnie's androgynous traits and other characters using the right pronouns for them.
they never use the term 'lesbians' for ruby and sapphire, or pearl and rose, or say they are and were in love, but with how intimate they are with each other and how they talk about being together, it's impossible to miss that they are. and garnet's wedding isn't ever described as a 'lesbian wedding', it's just a wedding, we know the two characters getting married are lesbians.
i'm pretty sure almost all of that was having to get it past cartoon network's bigoted censors, but the way they did it was so clever imo because it avoided the relationship dialogue being on-the-nose and made the storytelling way more compelling while not sacrificing any of the unapologetic queerness
Yes. (Though I actually once saw someone insist that this failure to use explicit words was COWARDLY--that they were refusing to confirm the queerness by not using the words, despite that they'd had a same-sex wedding on kids' TV and gotten banned in 17 countries for it.)
No, I don't know how many countries. It is probably not 17.
The interesting thing is that they treat the (presumably) straight characters the same as the queer ones that way. Greg never calls his relationship with Rose anything specific outside of "when I started dating your mother." Vidalia says "It's just been me and Yellowtail for a while" while picturing her wedding ring.
And the people who DO use specific words for these relationships are often wrong, intentionally misleading, or assuming. Greg calling Alexandrite his wife in a ruse for the Maheswarans. Uncle Andy asking which of the "girls" has gotta be "the wife" when he sees Greg has a kid (and mistakenly identifying Garnet). Ronaldo condescendingly saying Connie gets to use Rose's sword because "she's your girlfriend." Steven loudly saying Kiki and Ronaldo are "involved in a romantic relationship" when they're lying about it to end the Restaurant War.
There HAVE been just a few instances of explicitly named relationships, like Shep being named as Sadie's new partner, or Ronaldo saying he has a girlfriend (who turns out to miraculously exist). But it's notable that they aren't tiptoeing around the queer relationships refusing to define them while having no qualms about using specific language for the straight ones. The show repeatedly lets love be the important part and just shows us the love. What we call it isn't as important as how they show it.
And as a bonus, some of the people in this show who do stuff like getting married and living together as one entity don't identify as women. They're she/her characters, and present in a way the audience will interpret as overall femme/female, but they aren't women and wouldn't have any particular connection to terms like "girlfriend" or "wife." No one ever says "lesbians," but no one ever says "straight" either. It's beyond words.
And while there is a time and a place for explicitly named educational and instructive queer television, Steven Universe is more subtle in nearly all of its important messages. Nobody wrote this show saying "and now we will write an episode that is about teaching children that gay is OK." They simply showed a story where queerness is woven into its fabric by diverse and largely queer creators--characters whose queerness is part of them without being pointed out with its name on a trophy. The queerness is certainly very intentional, and that Crew bled to get it to us, but it ended up so seamlessly teaching us that we, the queer viewers (or our queer loved ones if it wasn't us) can also have stories that matter, can also be part of an exciting and brilliant and wholesome story without it being all about one thing, can also have a life that isn't a tragedy and a future that matters.
